RSS 2.0 Specification -- why RFC 822 date?

Harvard has the RSS 2.0 Specification online. Lately I was trying to convert atom feeds from blogger into rss with the help of xslt. Everything is relatively easy except the rfc822 date. While the month is easy to convert via

<xsl:value-of select='substring("JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec",$num*3-2, 3)'/>

where $num is the number of the month, starting at 1=Jan, this is not so easy with the day of week. Others obviously have/had the same problem. Mostly this is solved by some xslt processor specific external libraries.
Without the day of week name, the date entry is not valid. Luckily do rss readers like FeedDemon still recognice the feed.

NetBSD Online Store -- Help Fund NetBSD | CafePress

Finally, NetBSD items are available at CafePress NetBSD Online Store -- Help Fund NetBSD | CafePress and not only at good will from some NetBSD enthusiasts.

Amazon.de finally shows the cover art

Amazon.de finally also shows the cover art of my book Amazon.de: Bücher: JBoss.

It doesn't make a big difference, as the book did not change and the comment stays the same etc., but when you look at the book list, it directly makes a better impression when the cover art is shown as well.

The power of perl

The LaTeX-style of my publisher has some special definitions for environements. When starting to write my JBoss book, I started to use just the normal LaTeX figure environement. Today I thought that it is time to convert those about 230 occurences of

\begin{figure}
... some text
\caption{bla}
\label{foo} % only sometimes set
\end{figure}

into

\begin{fighere}{always a label}{the caption text}
... some text
\end{fighere}

I decided to take perl for the task. Ok, it took me some time to get into perl again after not having it used for years. But at the end the complete task took me 3 hours.

I am sure, doing it by hand, I would sit there the whole week. The pattern matching ability of perl and the associative arrays just make it a pleasure job.

How many books / items does Amazon have in their catalogue?

Since my JBoss book is listed @ Amazon.de, I am looking at its sales rank. First there was no rank given. Then I ordered a copy and after a while the rank climbed to around 1.400.000. Then I cancelled the copy again and now there is again no rank given.

Does a rank of 1.400.000 for one copy ordered/sold mean that Amazon has around one and a half million articles in their catalogue? Probably they have more, as not ordered items can be found and there are ~ 1.400.000 items that got sold at least once.

Anyone has a clue?

Finally some time to work on OS again

Now that I am waiting with my JBoss book on an external event, I did not work on it this weekend, but was again able to work on Xdoclet and to help Andy to test the second milestone of JBossMail.
It really feels good to do a little patching here, a little debugging there without someone in your back with a MS project plan tracking your mouse moves.

Apple store not reachable

The apple online store is no longe reachable after todays keynote from Steve Jobs at MacWorld expo. It seems that everyone ran out of the store do directly order a new Mac mini :-)

JBMail back from stasis

Andy Oliver is now back on JBMail, the mailserver project that he started. The first preview that I got in hands wasn't that useful, as it made some wrong assumptions about DNS servers.

In contrary to the last release, this preview is a binary one, including the whole ant 1.6.1 distribution (30 MB unzipped) :-( That at least explains why the package is now so fat.

But after this, the install runs fine if no TLS is used.

Running the mail service is still a little problem for me, as the name resolution doesn't quite work, but here on my Windows box, I am not able to tell if this is a problem with JBMail or Windows itself.

Xmas gift from Amazon

This year, Amazon made me a special gift. Instead of sending yet another coffee mug, they finally listed my JBoss book. Unfortunately, the nice cover graphics that you can see at the publishers page is not yet shown.
I am really looking forward to hold the real printed issues in my hand. Until then there is still some work to do.

Busy time

It's now over a month since my last post. I was just too busy to even read the Xdoclet and JBoss mailing list or even work on those projects. We had an important release at work which ate quite some time.

The other day I was asking are fop and batik dead? Meanwhile there is a new Apache subproject Xmlgraphics that seems to be the new umbrella for the new projects. But currently its mostly an empty shell.

With the release at work I am also not able to attend Javapolis conference in Antwerp and am so jealous about all the lucky ones that were ablt to go there.

Ws4ee tooling

I am currently having a discussion with Thomas Diesler on the JBoss Forum about the usage of Xdoclet for ws4ee (and especially in conjungtion with JBoss).
Thomas argues that there is no big gain in using Xdoclet for webservices, as it lacks support for wsdl-generation. He is of course right in the latter and I see the point that some work needs to be done here. Of course I am biased here as comitter on Xdoclet.
Thomas proposes wscompile from the sun JWSDP-package. But this also doesn't provide everything you need and you also have to write files on your own.
So the solution lies in the use of both tools: have xdoclet generate the service interface, ejb-jar.xml entries and webservices.xml and the jaxrpc-mapping, let wscompile provide the wsdl.
I outlined this at the JBossWS and Xdoclet wiki page.

Hewlett-Packard takes a new approach to software | CNET News.com

Hewlett-Packard takes a new approach to software | CNET News.com

This is interesting. As HP operates globally, they will take a good piece of the JASP cake. How will those service partners react?

For JBoss and open-source itself this is probably a good move, as many company including the classical IBM-customers (e.g. banks) will take JBoss and open-source more seriously and perhaps even consider switching from their "nobody got ever fired for buying IBM attitude".

German JBoss book announced

dpunkt.verlag listes a new JBoss book in their preview section. This is a German book and talks about JBoss 4.0. Target audience are admistrators and programmers that want to start with JBoss, but already have some basic J2EE and Java knowledge.
Why I mention this? Have a look at the author :-)

Are FOP and Batik dead?

When looking at the download directory for fop and batik
(Index of /dist/xml/), it looks like the two projects are pretty dead. There was a batik release this year in february, but only because there was a security issue with the squiggle browser (nice tool btw!). For fop, which is at version 0.20.5 the situation is even worse: last release was in july 2003!.

Update:
After reading this blog article, things seem clearer. There is no entry on this on the ASF pages though.

SVG: drawing DTDs

In the past, I wrote a little note about XML.com's article on svg tree drawing.

Currently, the way most people seem to go if they want to add a structural drawing of their DTDs is to use XmlSpy, open the DTD, convert to XML Schema and let XmlSpy draw the diagram. XmlSpy can then export the drawing as png, or one can do a screenshot and save it in another pixelized format. The result is really good looking:

It seems that there are also other tools on the market like Tibco TurboXML that can produce drawings of DTDs (and the Tibco one seems to be able to export them even as SVG, as JBoss had some html-versions of their DTD in SVG done with some Tibco tool).

While this is good for graphics on the web or just visualisation of complex structures, this is of no real use when you have to scale the graphics to include it in some printed work. So I started to write my own converter. With the help of the batik toolkit, this is working quite well. The current state looks like this:


(The respective svg looks like this).
Obviously not yet as good as the XmlSpy version, but I can just run the conversion on command line and do not need a XmlSpy-license :-)
I will update this page when there is more available.

Orlando's first birthday

My little son Orlando had his first birthday today. We had a party with his grand parents and a friend of him was walking by with his mom.
Orlando very much liked the fact that everyone took care of him and all that. He did not sleep during the afternoon - normally he sleeps for one to two hours.

It is so incredible that a year has passed now. At the start he was a tiny little something that slept, cried and filled the diapers. Now he is walking on his own, eating Pretzel with us, is starting to talk and will start going to the kindergarten next week.

SourceForge.net support

Ok, first: you get what you pay for ...

But an entity that claims to be the best and biggest platform for Open Source development should give better support.

Slowly from the beginning. Andrew uploaded the files to the download farm and set the release to 'hidden'. Then after uploading everything he set the release to 'active'.
Now people get the files in the download list, but when you select one, on the mirror page you get a notice that the mirror doesn't have the file and that sf.net will fix this.
Andrew opened a case with sf support, which was more or less 'just closed'. I also opened a case. And after not fully reading my initial submission, the support guy closed it after exchange of some questions and answers with "if it was hidden, then it will resolve itself in ten days".
What the heck? I see nowhere written, that hidden releases only reappear ten days after setting them to active. No notion why this is the case to what to do to increase re-appearance speed. Users are waiting for the files.

I was thinking about buying a sf.net subscription. But if this only gives me a bad answer faster than when I have no subscription, then no thanks.

Xdoclet: Release 1.2.2 is out

Xdoclet 1.2.2 has been released yesterday. This release is a big improvement with more than hundered closed issues and support for J2EE 1.4 Webservices, JDO 2, Java Server Faces and EJB 2.1.

JDK 5.0 support is still missing, but this will be supported in the next release.

The release entry on Freshmeat will tell you the details. If you use and like Xdoclet, then please also vote for it.

One of the interesting questions will be how much Xdoclet will be used in future now that annotations are part of the languge. Should Xdoclet try to process those as well? As an example: Thomas Diesler of JBoss is currently rewriting the ws4ee part, which is currently based on Axis. In a forum entry, he wrote recently, that JBossWS won't support Xdoclet, but support JSR-181 Webservices Metadata. Bill Burke already has some 'annotations for J2SE 1.4' in his AOP framework, so this will probably also be used in JBossWS. Ok, this is JBossWS only and other manufacturers won't provide such a thing. On the other hand, a translation from JDK 5 annotations to JDK 1.4 + Xdoclet tags might be useful.

Got my copy of "hibernate in action" today.

I got my copy of Hibernate in action today and made it through the foreword so far.

Amongst the reviewers of the book are a few Xdoclet developers: Ara Abrahamian, Matt Raible and Nick Heudecker. When I looked at Amazon sales ranking for the book I also saw that Eric Pugh, who also works on Xdoclet seems to write a book on Hibernate as well. It's a small world.

Now I am uncertain, as I was using Hibernate in the past: should I read the book chapter by chapter or just skip around and perhaps miss important things.

Well, I am glad that my copy is here im my hands now.

AOP: JBossAOP vs. JBoss-Interceptors

I am currently playing with JBossAOP in JBoss AS 4.0. Cool thing!
You basically write a POJO with a method that follows a signature pattern, do some xml mumbos-jumbo and throw everything in the app-server, which deploys it. That's all.

There is one drawback though: currently it is not possible to intercept calls to methods on the EJB home interface. That's still the domain of the old JBoss interceptors that exist since JBoss 2.x.

But else, JBossAOP is really fun.